Fun question time. Because you know how I love these little sidetracks from the real issues at hand.

If Flux’s eyeball is what Hans studied to increase his powers, but the Flux following me came from a future timeline that did not exist, does that mean another version of Flux’s eyeball exists now in this timeline? One that Hans could still use to make his objects and sell them? Or did it abruptly disappear one day?

Questions like this can drive a lesser man, say, one who cares about the results, insane. So instead of pointless guesswork, here’s more questions to drive you bonkers. How does a floating eyeball who spends its time mocking me with beeps and admiring workbenches hiccup in the first place? Flux’s engines don’t even point in the right directions, yet it still bounced up and down each time.

After binge watching “Boring Origin Stories, Season Two”, I now had goals that were far better than collapse pocket dimensions and hoping something useful happened. I’d track down the Hotel California and maybe see if there was a link between mystical hotels and metal chains. I’d also keep an eye out for Hans and explore the mystery of Flux’s other eye. Both options were good.

Finding the Hotel California could be annoying. The last time I’d ventured there it’d been by accident. I’d come out with the dead-but-not-anymore Christina by way of drunken unicorn. Finding Hans could probably be solved by talking to Ted. Both routes mattered but I couldn’t figure out how the two intersected.

“Or do they?” I said abruptly then rolled my eyes. “God dammit. Hans’ got me talking out loud now too.”

The alternate version of him had been talking to himself in half the footage that Flux recorded, right up until his later years. My mind still hadn’t wrapped itself around the idea of timelines that didn’t exist. It seemed like one of those fields of study that required six doctorates and a lot of cocaine. Which would be one way to pass time, except some superpower would come alone and throw hard science out the window.

Fuck time continuity right in it’s wiggly rear.

In my version of reality, the technomancer had been in space with my dad in that jail cell and I’d never heard about their aftermath. Correction, I’d learn that the space version of my family disappeared and a real version of them had been found in some remote corner of the United States. Hans was my important than my toaster dad. If I was lucky, somewhere on the Hero Watch website would be an answer. I fired up the internet and did some research. Both kinds, enjoyable and annoying. Flux even let me.

My internet sleuth skills were a mess. I gave up digging and phoned the main office.

“If it isn’t my favorite field reporter,” Emily said. She was a shorter thin woman with a dull expression regardless of what happened. Add narrow glasses with long blank hair and you should have a solid image of the woman answering my call for help.

“I’m a paycheck with charm.”

Emily said nothing and the line stayed quiet.

I kept on going, “Are you saying I’m not? Charm is my middle name. I think. I’ve forgotten. Is it on the website somewhere useful? Maybe it’s quacking. Adam Quacking Millard. With better powers, I could call myself The Quack!” my voice reverberated. I had practice at sounding dramatic.

Emily stayed quiet. The only hint of my hotel phone working was the constant clacking of keys.

“I have a rather high opinion of myself.” My gaze drifted to the abused spackle ceiling of my hotel. “And told I’m a freak in the bed.”

Emily didn’t even snort. “Alice was. I learned more tricks from your footage than my entire time at college. That thing with the pinky. Gold mine.”

“But I helped.”

“You were an emaciated toy doll being subjected to the whims of a woman too good for you.” Emily clicked wildly on something then sighed. “But you were there. It might have been the only positive thing you’ve done for society. Beyond that trip to Idaho where half the state’s potatoes turned to mush. I hate potatoes and everything made from them.”

This probably made me a literal prostitute. Odd, the things you rationalize when your life is full of madness and superpowers. Keep in mind that the madness plays second fiddle to the day-to-day of our hero world.

Emily continued her high speed clicking of the keyboard. Every so often she’d pause, sigh heavily, then burst out with another round of button mashing.

“So, you do have a voice. Thought I’d got one of those text to voice programs.”

“I’m perfectly willing to respond when you say something interesting,” Emily responded.

“Everything I say is interesting.”

“If that helps you sleep at night. Alone. In an empty hotel room. With your voyeur robot and porn.”

That seemed like it wasn’t rude enough, so I helped by adding, “Don’t forget the blow-up dolls and lube.”

“Classy as always Adam.”

“I’m not the one who posted porn in a hidden section of the website that my mother found.” Or so my other mother said during our brief interactions on the moon. An event that may or may not have happened. I still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of meeting my imagined family versus the real one hidden away in some corner of America.

Emily clicked a few keys. I heard a sound bite in the background that may have been Alice mid-murder or climax. “Money makes the world go around,” Emily said.

The sense of my life turning into a circus show for anyone with a few dollars should bother me. I’d put it on the long list of facets to my existence that were both sad and questionable. It would be number five, below “Somehow still existing” and above “Never any toilet paper in a desert”

“You and Ted.”

“Everyone, Adam. Everyone. Because we need. Money gets us everything else. For enough cash I’ll violate your privacy. The Judge upheld that clause too. Your governmental No-Go doesn’t affect our site. They even pay us to keep track of other no-gos through you.”

My lips curled. I couldn’t figure out how to hate her and be utterly indifferent to the trespass on my life. The leftover teenager in me hated the public humiliation. The man I’d been since my first event all those years ago, simply couldn’t be bothered to care. That’s why I engaged in sour attempts at witty banter instead.

“As much as I love our talks, you only call when you want something. What is it?” Emily said.

I couldn’t figure out how to broach the subject of finding Hans or Cindy. Despite my mental about face on dealing with them, talking to any of the three employees at Hero Watch strained me. We were basically divorced spouses who could barely talk to each but still had too much in common. We needed each other. Or at least, they enjoyed the money my existence brought in due to internet fame.

Keeping Ted calm amounted to not being sarcastic. Sarcasm required being bitter at the world and by this point I’d mostly grown tired of existence. Emily simply didn’t care about my existence half the time. I believed it to be a distance equals comfort factor. Staying out of their home and not holding them hostage at ring-blaster point seemed to do the trick for her and Iggy.

I kind of liked Iggy. He had this nervous joking mentality that proved awkward. Plus, my argument over them had been about kidnapping Alice, and they’d been rather nice to her. They’d simply tried to keep her sedated. Given what I knew about Alice now, sedation seemed a rather harmless way to deal with her. I mean, Alice summoned knives out of thin air and murdered anything in sight while smiling and making noises like the audio clip Emily had just played.

Emily did us a favor and changed the subject. “Anything exiting coming with the next upload?”

Flux provided them footage in whatever batches it determined to be worthwhile. The easy bet is that it wouldn’t provide them the last week of my life. I’d been watching Hans create the floating eyeball in some internet hostage situation.

“I doubt it. But maybe the one after this should be interesting. Maybe I’ll be attacked by sentient ice cream monsters.”

“The chart says it’ll be a level four at best. Maybe a secondary race invasion, or a power team clash.” I’d swear her eyes rolled hard enough for me to hear them. “At least it won’t be mole people. Those were getting old.”

“The chart” marked every trackable event in my life. It merged in nonsense from government websites, social media, and every other documented event in the world. They graphed it all. The math had serious gaps and I’d tried to fill in some of the blanks. Everyone agreed I’d seen some weird shit over the years but still no one believed the stories of my off-camera events.

I’d spent hours trying to explain to the internet about the possession and battle nuns. They didn’t believe a sect of them could exist or would care about fighting demons. Compared to sentient mole people, fighting nuns were an easy leap.

“You’re doing the thing again.”

She’d called me out on my wandering mind. Which is a problem I have since very little ever seemed urgent. That’s probably one of the side effects to being theoretically immortal. “Space has a certain appeal that actual conversations will never measure up to.”

“Since you’re not telling my why you’re calling, I’m hanging up,” Emily said.

I got distracted by the sheer boredom of my hotel wall and she made good on her promise to disconnect. After a few minutes, I dialed the Hero Watch office number again.

“As riveting as our conversations are some of us have to do work to earn money.”

“But this is the highlight of my week,” I responded.

More keyboard clicking filled up the silence. She sighed then asked, “And you wanted?”

The witty banter did nothing for me either. I moved on to my real goals.

“Hans. Or Cindy,” I said. “I need to find one of them.”

“You do know there’s trackers on the website for various heroes, right? That’s the whole theme of our group. Hero Watch. Watching. Heroes.”

“Oh, is that what our website’s for?” I emphasized the word our just to dig at her.

Emily sighed again then snorted. “I still can’t believe that held up in court.”

“The highest court.”

Insert boring pause here.

Emily broke the newest round of silence first, “I’m not your secretary. Use the search bar. Type in the code name and it’ll show up.”

“I typed in Alice. It didn’t work.”

“Alice is gone. We all saw it. The world saw it. There’s a webcast series where all those people can tell each other how right they are about what they saw. I’ve got links to fourteen thesis extrapolating the nature of reality and two world renowned professors who weighed in on the footage.”

I said nothing. Emily knew of my vague quest. Everyone with access to the internet had a good idea of my goals. It’s why Steve or whatever had been on guard against me. In my version of the world it proved hard to take a shit without someone noticing.

“Right.”

“She’s not coming back.”

“So, my point is that the search doesn’t work for me.”

Ever heard someone’s brain reset abruptly? I have. It sounded like the silence where Emily said nothing for five seconds. “Alice isn’t her super hero name.”

“What is it?”

“Too-Good-For-Adam. It’s trending on all the social media sites.” My eyes rolled this time. Alice had tried to murder Emily, I think, but she clearly stood on her side at not mine. I couldn’t win. “Did you type in Hans’s superhero name?” Emily asked slowly.

“I don’t know his superhero name. I barely know his real name. I’ve met the man all of three or fourteen times in my life and we’re not even to Christmas greeting card stage.”

“I,” her brain must of reset because she stopped talking and typed rapidly. “He’s going to be at this annual Grey Bizarre. Two days from now. Looks like it’s in Dallas, again. I don’t know why anyone holds events in Dallas. It’s like asking to be shit on.”

“Did you have an address?”

“Adam. I promise that if you get on a bus to Dallas, right now, then you’ll get to the bizarre. I don’t have to tell you the address.”

With a pending category four event and aiming myself toward Dallas, I’d practically wake up in the middle of some event down there. We hung up, I stumbled to put on my shower washed attire and ventured off to find a mode of transportation that wouldn’t blow up on me. The bus would be an annoying journey involving people but bearable.

Luckily, someone clubbed me on the back of the head as I left the hotel property. My vision blacked.

I woke with the wind in my face and a song filling the air around me. Not because Angels had abducted me. No, but because I’d been strapped to the roof of a car. My legs were bound, and mouth gagged. Flux hovered along, watching me with laser like focus or utter boredom.

Whomever had kidnapped me chose to be mean. They’d bound my wrists with tight ropes. The skin chafed and I judged myself to have been bound to the roof of this clown car for at least six hours. I leaned back on a pillow or sleeping bag and tried to get more sleep.

After all, when you’re strapped to the top of the car going down the highway, it’s not a good idea to try and escape. That’s how you tumble into oncoming traffic. Then my entire plan of hitching a ride to Dallas to find Hans would go out the window.

Sleeping while doing eighty isn’t easy. My face felt like it’d been blasted with sandpaper. Every bug in the universe veered into my mouth. We passed by some speed trap and I found we were doing closer to fifty but I couldn’t tell the difference.

I woke up with my face slammed into luggage. The world spun and my arms flopped wildly trying to find purchase. They were too numb to do much else. Hot asphalt burned against my cheek.

It didn’t feel good. My stomach growled at me over the smell of my own flesh burning. Moving hurt, so I went about trying to fix myself. I lifted my magic ring of nonsense and summoned forth green goop. For those who forgot, I’d once been in some shadow mole people home world and they had a material that healed most wounds. It also left me a slimy gross mess. They also had some weird sort of glass netting that held with falling from great heights, but I preferred to use Show Stoppers magic bowtie for that.

Green slime poured out all over me and the luggage.

A man stopped next to me. All I saw were ugly shoes with goo on them. I tilted my head up and saw the silhouette of a man’s head backed by a burning sun. “Why’d you do that?” the man asked.

“Petty vengeance.” That smell of slightly sizzled flesh lingered. “Plus it smells nice.”

The mole people concoction had this delightful aroma of garbage and lime.

The outline of a man tilted a bit and his face blocked more of the sunlight. He shrugged then stepped over me and to the car. He opened the door and his vague outlined seemed to shake its head. It was hard to tell. “Oh well. It’s not like I care. Not my luggage. And my contract ended once it hit the pavement. Have a good day!” He got in the car and slammed the door.

My revenge attempt being derailed made me frown. I stood and rubbed my slowly healing wrists. “Well then whose is it?” I shouted at the already retreating car. The courier didn’t feel the need to answer me and barely signaled before turning into traffic.

I took a look around. A fancy pillar jutted out of the ground with convention center in sideways letters. At the top perked the lone star of Texas. All bright and bold and awkwardly mixing in the united state’s three colors like they hadn’t tried to succeed a few dozen times for one reason or another. Selective patriotism struck me as hypocritical.

People ventured down the hall. Others gave me and the green glop wide birth. I stood there catching my breath and relishing the feeling of standing still until someone stomped behind me. That’s how this sort of stuff normally went. I ended up somewhere new then strangers dropped by to poke me tongue depressors or knives.

“No time to waste, Mr. Millard! Chip chop!” the person behind me said in a safari hunter accent. “Or was that chop chip. My goodness, this sun is going to melt my brain.”

I stood up and wiped myself down. The goo would dry out but until then it felt like aloe on a sunburn. Sticky and made my skin stiff. My eyesight slowly adjusted after hours of being pelted by dust and bugs.

“You ruined my luggage. So much for trying to offset the teleportation bill,” a man behind me said in a more normal voice.

Naturally, I took my sweet time turning around. There stood an unexpected “friend”. Who, you might ask? Ted, naturally. Question asked, question answered. I ignored his question about luggage because it would be impossible to tell if he meant me, or the mess around me, but he should have been able to figure out the answer either way.

He stood in one of his neat suits that fit around a much thinner waist line. Married life must have been good for him. Or the months of island vacations. He’d lost weight and deepened his already annoying tan to the next level.

“Are you allowed to be within five feet of me?”

Ted gifted me one of his plastic grins and reached into his back pocket. Out came an envelope. He pulled out and unfolded the note.

“Onto the tough questions. Yes, as a matter of fact. I got this in the mail last week.” He shook the letter. “From The Judge. I didn’t know he, they, sent people mail. Or that his mail said The Judge on it. It’s very stylish handwriting, and this paper. You can see the watermark on it.” He held up the paper briefly then smiled happily. “That was an interesting tidbit to put on the website.”

“I bet it was,” I said dryly. Something about Ted talking made me consciously sound sarcastic. I did feel impressed that The Judge wrote letters.

Ted stared at me then sighed while folding up the letter.

“Details my dear boy, it’s always in the details. Like these water marks. It’s just like when you interview people, poorly, and bypass their quips. What was that footage you had? Ah,” he brightened up and shook his head excitedly. “Ragnarök, that beefy fellow said. He’s not far off. It’s madness out here. Even in the Midwest. Did your driver take you by the giants?”

“Went right by them,” I responded.

We might have. I couldn’t remember since most of the trip had been my face being blasted by wind sheer, or naps. A more honest recount would have been “I passed out due to oxygen issues but didn’t die so here we are”.

“Did they throw anything? Never mind, the giants are in Utah of all places. But maybe you saw some. I’ll check the footage latter. It’s far easier to get an answer out of our little friend.”

Flux beeped. I shuddered then took note of the floating eye. It’d been unobtrusive as always.

Eventually I shrugged then nodded to Ted. “I am an unreliable narrator.”

“Quiet right,” he responded sharply in his safari captain accent. “Subjective journalism at it’s worst. Luckily absurdity sells just as well as sex. Perhaps it’s for the best that my attempts at teaching were ignored.” He gestured me down the street.

We both left his luggage behind.

Ted talked as we walked, providing me a lifetime’s worth of interview tips. I tuned most of it out. The only good advice seemed to be “ask questions that make people squirm”. You can tell me how I’m doing on that front.

His luggage got further away, which made me wonder how much he cared. Like me, Ted traveled light. He had his bag of magic summoning stones somewhere for all the complicated stuff. Based on his earlier tip, he’d probably teleported here using the magic mirror back at Hero Watch’s loft.

The sidewalk narrowed until we reached some sort of virus symbols plastered across chain link fences covered by tarps. The whole mess routed us further and further until we came to an old woman sitting at a table. Binders were stacked on either side of her and the trash can at her side had at least two forests worth of paper shoved into it.

She glanced at Ted over thick black rims that made her face look like it had a butterfly on it.

“Check in?” she said.

“Indeed.” Ted gave the small stand a once over. He turned to look down the long quarantine hallway we’d ventured through. “How are the new security measures?”

She shook a pen next to her ear then scowled before answering. “Largely ineffective but for your protection.”

“Did they cancel the clone versus minion bash up?”

“Entirely,” the old woman said without a shred of emotion. “The association instituted a mandatory distance policy between unknown parties. That means all events involving three or more people are canceled.” She took a depth breath then said slow,” For your protection, all venders have life like gloves, courtesy of Doctor Graftables, and guaranteed not to lose an ounce of sensation. This will ensure that no plagues travel from person to person during this high risk event.”

“Didn’t they catch Plague Commander?”

“Many other disease causing powered people still exist at large. Due to the un,” she paused her mechanical recitation and looked at a laminated sheet next to her. A second later she flipped it over and found a passage. “Due to the unstable nature of our environment, we are taking extra precautions. For your safety.”

Ted smiled. “All this over a little bit of chaos.”

“Last week, a man standing right where your sidekick is-” she glared at me and I did a jig in response, because I liked the idea of being Ted’s sidekick again. “turned into a pile of purple puss that then swanned alien monsters. Those little monsters ate six visitors and got into the air conditioning ducts. Naturally we are greatly concerned about the damage,” she sighed and rolled her eyes, “that such events can do to our dear patresons.”

She stared at Ted. Ted smiled and shut up.

“Name,” the check-in lady shouted. Ted’s mouth opened and she cut him off, “and occupation.”

“Ted Rose, reporter for Hero Watch.”

“Any other aliases,” the woman said.

“Tele-Graph is the villain persona.”

“Any other aliases?”

“Husband of Lisa Rose.”

“Lisa Rose.” The old woman paused and moved her pen down a few boxes and scribbled in the name. “That goes under references. Does she have an alias?”

“Moaner.”

She didn’t bat an eye and slowly wrote the name into the blank box.

I leaned over and whispered at Ted, “That angry shrew you remarried is ‘Moaner’ Lisa Rose?”

Ted beamed, “Indeed sir.”

See how he didn’t dispute the term shrew? Even Ted knew she had a few screws loose. I’d only met her twice that I could recall and the first time she’d been beaten rather soundly by an alien mob. The second time she’d been trying to beat me senseless and Golden Sun held her back.

Let’s not think about the weird relationship triangle between Golden Sun, Moana Lisa, and Ted. By not asking questions, I would demonstrate a growing “wisdom”.

“It’s my fault actually. After our bitter divorce I abused my position and changed her name everywhere we had access to,” he said with complete calm. It sounded like gross misconduct and possibly worth yanking some journalistic credentials over. But I didn’t have any sort of license to report. Ted might not have one either.

Maybe it simply didn’t matter if you had enough of the right footage. The internet was funny like that.

We went into the convention. It looked much the same as the last one I’d been to. There were tables set up everywhere. Some were sad looking with overly cheery people trying to use an annoying smile to make up for poor presentation skills. Their hands were disturbingly shiny. I presumed that to be a side effect of the magical gloves or whatever that greeter had told us about.

Other booths were fancy beyond belief. Ted grabbed us both swag bags and, as before, calmly took every single pamphlet shoved at him then deposited them into the bag.

“Before your relocation, Emily was telling me of you utter unawareness of our code names. That’s disgraceful. You have your own name and other people have certainly memorized it.”

“The Fiasco. It’s like saying The Disaster, only slightly fancier. And less hurricane season gone wrong.”

“Yes.” He nodded as we elbowed through a crowd that clearly didn’t care about distance laws or safety precautions. “With a The in the front. Do you know how hard those are to get?”

I hummed by way of response. Someone put a flier into my hands that had women on the front. Nothing else stood out because the female on the front had enough assets hanging out that the rest of the page didn’t matter. Ted rolled his eyes at me, “See? Sex sells. Or at least the allusion of it gets attention. Though I’d wager most will only try to figure out her name and not the product being solve.”

I hummed again and took a look at the product being sold. A glance back at the booth associated with the flier revealed a row of high functioning sex dolls. The kind that made my replicating blow-up dolls look like, well, blow-up dolls.

“You need to be better about this. Remember names. Use them in a conversation. It works in interviews. Gives people the impression you care about them as individuals.”

My sarcastic response would have been “Oh, I care about everyone.” But instead I said “It gets hard to keep track of all the people out there.”

“It’s getting easier every day. The casuality list is piling up.”

There were no good responses. People had been dying. Some of it had been my fault but I felt fairly sure that most of the disasters out there were simply people that didn’t want to miss out on the action. It’s like my adventures being on the internet had spawned a whole host of copycats trying to profit from first-hand footage of powered people being idiots.

Naturally, when my adventures turned apocalyptic, so did the copy cats.

We passed by a familiar stand. The signs outside were still the same as ever. “Madam Zhora,” it said. “Have your fortune told” and “Don’t be afraid of death. Madam Zhora will tell you when it happens.”

“Madam Zhora?”

“Doomseer.”

“Sear?”

“See, er. As in she sees doom.”

“Makes perfect sense.”

Ted’s eyes narrowed as he tried to figure out if I was being sarcastic or not. I wasn’t but letting him believe whatever he’d wanted felt easier than arguing. Goading him felt like the best way to keep our relationship somewhat distant but functional. He expected me to have an attitude. I expected him to look down his nose at everyone while trying to get a good scoop out of people.

“After you cleaned her out last time, she doesn’t have as much money.”

Madam Zhora had a running pool of money she used to lure in clients.

“It’s not about that.”

“Suit yourself.

This time, I put myself through the door into the tiny room that separated out Madam Zhora from the rest of the world. The red light lit, my view of Ted went away and for a brief second I felt trapped in a capsule.

I tried to calm down in case a single moment of panic set off my powers.

The light flipped to green and the doorway to Madam Zhora’s room opened up. I stepped and felt a brief wave of nostalgia. For simpler times. When I wasn’t trying to collapse mythical realms or seeking out gods to fight. Before the ring. Before Alice when I thought the most complicated factor of my life revolved around being possessed by two demons.

Madam Zhora wore the same hood as ever. A glass ball sat on the table. The embroidered cloth beneath it had been garnished into oblivion. I couldn’t tell what color it had started out as due to layers of pointless embellishments. I smiled at the unchanging nature of her setup. The entire ensemble had been designed to look like an over the top fortune teller, down to the endless gold hoops over her arms and her earrings.

“Welcome, I am Madam Zhora” she mumbled in her horrible accent.

“Hi again,” I said happily. Sure, she was depressive, but I liked Madam Zhora. We had a kinship due to our screwed up powers.

“Ah, you return,” Madam Zhora said as she lifted her gaze to study me. The greeting remained unfinished. Her eyes went wide and mouth hung. A second later her chest heaved but still no sound came out.

She screamed. The world numbed. My ears buzzed with a sound that might have been static or both legs falling asleep.

Then things got weird. Which from me, means something.

***

Character Dossier

Name: Madam Zhora

Gender: Female

Age: Forty Seven

Generalized Ratings as Follows

Strength: 4 (Wiery)

Intelligence: 4 (Uneducated)

Agility: 6 (Yoga Pro)

Luck: 1 (Depressive)

Attitude: Hates Socializing. Likes Money. Exhausted.

Items of Note

Finds having a terrible accent funny. Often enjoys messing with people who try to treat her too seriously. Rarely goes out and has a list of restaurants in every major city marked on her phone for take out. Has spent millions book art venues for a solo viewing.

Powers

Madam Zhora can see the final moments of nearly anyone’s life. The only people she can’t see the end of are classified as True Immortals. In fact, this is often the best test of if a power includes immortality. High ranking powers often check with her prior to accepting a risky mission, if only to prepare for events to go sideways. Villains will also check with her before risky heists or after they’ve had drinking benders that resulted in questionable mechanical designs.

Madam Zhora is only the latest person in a long line of people with this power. Most kill themselves early, or are driven utterly insane by their visions. This power hops to the next person should either event happen. Modern technology has allowed her to quarantine herself at any location and still find a way to make money.

Fun Fact

Madam Zhora has seen so many bad endings that she ghost writes for horror movie directors. Names and powers are changed by the gruesome endings aren’t. She’s also an excellent makeup artist. There is a coffee brew named after her that’s so strong it can kill someone.